Google gunning for Iphoto

WE'VE BEEN racking our tiny brains trying to come up with a viable reason why Internet behemoth Google would spend time and resources on porting its free photo libararian and editing software over to the Mac, and we were pretty much stumped for quite some time.

Picasa does everything Iphoto does, but nothing more as far as a quick ten minute investigation reveals. It's pretty fast, but so is Apple's offering. It has lots of basic tools for footling with your snaps... but so does Iphoto.

In fact the only benefit we could see is that Picasa could be really useful if you happen to work in a dual platform environment.

If your place of business has Windows machines as well as Macs, and you want very basic editing tools tied to a reasonably powerful media librarian, Picasa's non-destructive editing, and ability to fiddle with the mystic way in which Iphoto deals with your files, could be just the ticket.

Picasa is also much less fussy about where you put your media files and will sniff out any stray photos lurking in places where Iphoto would never deign to even look.

Web connectivity is, as you would expect with a Google product, pretty much spot on and we were firing photos onto the interweb in seconds.

The 17.2MB download is totally free, simple to install, but lacks Iphoto's polished appearance and seamless integration with other Apple applications. µ